Pages

Sunday, September 22, 2013

88. The House of Death, the Mystic Rose, and Avenoodles

The story of
Fifth Avenue in the second half of the nineteenth century is fraught with
social wars waged with engraved calling cards dropped in silver card receivers
just inside the entrance of palatial free-standing mansions. It was a war waged above all by the ladies,
while their spouses competed on Wall Street or at the race track or in fancy
gambling dens, or in regattas where they raced their yachts. These wars were fought
with fervor and conviction, and for those involved, if not for society at large,
the stakes were high. The battlefield
was an avenue well built up to the south, but stretching on northward as a
rutted lane into a semirural wasteland that a visionary few – mostly real
estate developers, one suspects -- had christened the city’s future Axis of
Elegance. Confirming their vision in
1853 was the decision by Archbishop John Hughes to build a majestic Catholic
cathedral on Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st Street, a
decision followed by excavations and a sprouting of walls but nothing more,
owing to a lack of funds. Still, the
promise of a cathedral, albeit Romanist, did seem to foretoken a thoroughfare
of taste and distinction.

One citizen who shared
this opinion was Charles Lohman, a free-thinking self-appointed physician who
in 1857 must have driven north over the rutted course of the avenue through an area given over to
stockyards, truck gardens, scattered institutions, a few dispersed houses and
shanties, and finally a rocky wasteland of scrub pines and bushes fit only for
grazing cattle and goats. Quite possibly
he took his wife with him, so he could show her some land that he was tempted
to buy. The pending construction of the
cathedral, and the city’s plans to begin work on the magnificent new Central
Park, seemed certain to enhance the value of the Avenue. What Lohman had in mind were ten lots at the
corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street that the archbishop was said
to want for his official residence.
Since His Grace had seen fit to denounce Madame Restell, the abortionist,
from the pulpit, and since Madame Restell was the nom de guerre of Lohman’s wife, the couple deemed it deliciously
appropriate to snatch the property out from under the archiepiscopal nose. On May 1, 1857, Lohman did exactly that,
outbidding the archbishop handily. Informed
of this, respectable citizens offered Lohman a substantial sum for the
property, but he refused to sell. Later
that year a panic erupted on Wall Street, sending real estate prices
plummeting, and halting construction along Lower Fifth Avenue. Had the Lohmans made a mistake? After a year of “pinching times” the stock
market recovered, trade picked up again, and construction along the Avenue
resumed. No, the Lohmans had not made a
mistake.

The Lohman residence, a palatial brownstone.Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Respectable
society was now venturing farther uptown, building brownstones along the Avenue
in the 50s. Then, in 1862, ground was
broken on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street,
where the walls of a handsome new mansion began to rise: the Lohmans were
building at last! Horrified by the
thought of the town’s most notorious abortionist residing grandly in their
midst, adjacent property owners offered Lohman a reputed $100,000 for the
property, but he spurned it. The
construction took two years but in the end produced a four-story brownstone
with a monumental entrance, its recessed doors flanked by pilasters and topped
by a protruding ornamental hood, with gardens and stables adjoining: a monument
worthy of the Avenue and destined to catch every passing eye.

So Madame had
installed herself just two blocks from the rising walls of the unfinished
cathedral, and just across 52nd Street from, ironically (given her
profession), the spacious grounds of the Catholic Orphan Asylum. “She’ll have no society!” opined the neighbors
were certain that she would have no society, but sometime later the windows
were ablaze with gaslight to receive a jam of carriages with arriving guests:
wealthy merchants, brokers, railroad moguls, physicians, lawyers, and even a
few magistrates and legislators, all lured there by the hostess’s charm and
notoriety, and the thrill of witnessing her ill-gotten wealth; some of them –
unthinkable! – even brought their wives.
All four floors were on display: three ground-floor parlors in bronze
and gold with frescoes by Italian artists; the second floor with the Lohmans’
sumptuous bedroom; the third floor with servants’ rooms showing Brussels
carpets and mahogany; and the fourth with a billiard room, and ballroom whose
windows gave a fine view of the Avenue and the Park. Guests danced, played cards, smoked expensive
cigars provided by the hosts, feasted at a table laden with delicacies, and
gaped at the luxurious furnishings.

No gold
speculator or thriving war contractor could match Madame’s dazzling debut on
the Avenue. But if she and her husband
gave receptions regularly thereafter, and they were well attended, it was
mostly by gentlemen who didn’t bring their wives. Ann Lohman had all the trappings of wealth –
costly millinery, a palatial residence, and five carriages and seven horses –
but she waited in vain for calling cards to be dropped in her card receiver, cards that would acknowledge
her acceptance by Society, cards that never came. So despite a promising beginning, Madame had
lost the war.

Chagrin at her
defeat may at in part explain why, in May 1867, a large silver plate bearing
the engraved word OFFICEappeared on a gate in the low iron
railing at 1 East 52nd Street, informing sharp-eyed neighbors that
the mistress of the mansion would henceforth carry on her profitable business
in the basement. Soon, closed carriages
began arriving and depositing heavily veiled women who descended to the
basement and, sometime later, came back up, still heavily veiled, to depart
discreetly; the neighbors watched, shocked.
Complaints to the authorities proved useless; Madame had arrangements
with them. Only she knew which husbands
mounted the steep stoop to her receptions, and which of their wives descended
to the basement, and her lips were sealed.
But this was revenge of a kind. For
moralists, the persistence of this shadowy business on the Avenue proclaimed
the impotence of justice and the rewards of crime and vice; as for the house
itself, they labeled it the House of Death.

Not even an
abortionist’s presence on the Avenue could slow down the relentless push uptown
of the wealthy. In 1869 Mrs. Mary Mason
Jones, a dowager of impeccable pedigree and, incidentally, an aunt of Edith
Wharton, shocked everyone by moving to the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and
57th Street, an area still afflicted with slaughterhouses and
shantytowns, and charitable institutions that, however noble their purpose,
were not deemed fit neighbors for the mansions of the affluent. And once again the pioneer proved right:
others followed and the area was soon filled with brownstones topped with a
mansard roof.

Mrs. Astor, as painted by Carolus-Duran.

Inhabiting these
residences, often as not, were fresh waves of parvenus who relied on their vast
fortunes to worm their way into Society, and whom others labeled Avenoodles. Determined to be a bulwark against the inroads of these moneyed
barbarians was Caroline Astor, the wife of William B. Astor, a wealthy grandson
of old John Jacob, whose older brother John Jacob III ran the family business,
leaving him to a life of idleness given over to race track attendance, pursuing
women other than his wife, and yachting.
Unburdened by a usually absent spouse, Caroline, a Schermerhorn who
could lay claim to even more illustrious ancestry than the Astors, acquired a
court chamberlain in Ward McCallister, a Society-obsessed Southerner who had
long since come North, traveled abroad, studied the manners, genealogy, and
heraldry of European aristocrats, and married an heiress.

Together, in
1872, this like-minded twosome created the Patriarchs, a group of social
eminences including both Old and New Money, who inaugurated the Patriarchs’
Balls, exclusive affairs reserved only for those deemed socially
acceptable. Well covered in the press,
these affairs made it very clear who was in and who was out, thus imposing a
rigorous order on what might otherwise have been a chaotic social flux. Supplementing the balls were private weekly
dinner parties at Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue and 34th Street mansion,
where conversation was limited to food, wine, horse flesh, yachts, country
estates, cotillions, and marriages.
Lacking both beauty and charm, Caroline Astor through force of will and
cunning quickly established herself as the reigning queen of New York Society –
“Society,” be it noted, with a capital S.
McCallister christened her “the Mystic Rose,” a reference to the
celestial figure in Dante’s Paradise around
whom all other figures revolve; she didn’t object.

The Vanderbilt mansion, flanked by brownstones. Suddenly, palatial brownstones like the Lohman residence began to look drab and dated. French chateau style was definitely in.

Into this
rarefied world, or at least butting up against its barriers, came the Vanderbilts. Not just one but a whole bunch of them who,
between 1878 and 1882, built residences between 51st and 58th
Street, a neighborhood redeemed at last from scandal by Madame Restell’s arrest
and suicide in 1878. Mrs. Astor was not
inclined to let these upstarts into her charmed social circle, even though the
Vanderbilts had more money, and the grandchildren, well educated and well
traveled, had put a distance between themselves and the founder of their
fortune, old Cornelius, a gritty character who never quite shook off the rich
profanity and rough ways of a wharf rat.
But Alva Vanderbilt, the wife of William K., was determined to make her
way socially, and got her husband to commission a new Fifth Avenue residence at
52nd Street, a palatial edifice modeled on Francis I’s
sixteenth-century chateau of Blois. The
result was an imposing three-story chateau in gray limestone (emphatically not
brownstone) with a steep slate roof, like nothing the Avenue had ever seen
before; it launched a vogue in French chateau-style residences that changed
radically that thoroughfare’s look. In
no time the east side of Fifth Avenue above
59th Street would be crowded with such residences facing the Park,
earning the Upper Avenue the name Millionaires Row.

Alva Vanderbilt, costumed for her ball.

Alva filled her
new residence with Renaissance and medieval furniture, tapestries, and armor,
and announced a costume ball for March 1883 that the city’s elite, seeing it as
the most spectacular event of the season, decided they simply must attend. Dressmakers toiled day and night for weeks,
and groups of young ladies of the appropriate status practiced complex
quadrilles to be performed on the magical night. Among them was Caroline Astor’s daughter
Carrie, a school acquaintance and friend of one of Mrs. Vanderbilt’s
daughters. But no invitation for Carrie
came.

Puzzled as others
received invitations, and well aware that her daughter had her heart set on
performing in the quadrille, Caroline Astor put out cautious feelers: why no
invitation? Through third parties, the
word came back: Mrs. Vanderbilt would love to invite dear Carrie, but how could
she, when she didn’t know Mrs.
Astor? So there it was: the Vanderbilts
might be upstarts, but her daughter’s happiness was at stake. “It’s time for Vanderbilts!” declared Mrs.
Astor. Going up the Avenue in her
carriage, she sent a footman in Astor-blue
livery to deliver an engraved calling card to a servant in Vanderbilt-maroon
livery at 660 Fifth Avenue, who dropped it in his mistress’s card
receiver. Mrs. Astor hadn’t even entered
the Vanderbilt chateau, but the calling card sufficed; the invitation
came. With this simple act, the
Vanderbilts were “in.”

The ball itself
was the grandest event to date in the city’s history. Outside, police held back a dense crowd of
onlookers as guests, their costumes masked, stepped down from their carriages
and entered the brilliantly lit mansion, while other carriages drove slowly
past so their uncostumed occupants could peer though the windows. Inside, palms and ferns, and orchids of every
hue, had transformed the mansion into a tropical forest. In the oak-paneled ballroom the young ladies
performed their quadrilles to the satisfaction of the other guests, who were
costumed splendidly as knights, brigands, monks, bullfighters, Music, Fire,
Summer, Louis the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth, Bo Peep, and the
Electric Light. What Mrs. Astor wore I
haven’t been able to ascertain.

Mr. Roland Redmond, whose costume I haven't been able to decipher.

Mrs. John C. Mallory, well garbed,well veiled.

The affair was
amply recorded in the newspapers, and guests were encouraged to visit a
designated photographer, lest their magnificence be lost to posterity. Many did, and the photographs have been
preserved, showing the elite of the day posing very seriously in white satin
with gold embroidery, black velvet with puffed sleeves, gauze wings when
appropriate, gold-trimmed velvet and gray tights, flowered chintz, and a
hundred other materials, all taking themselves very seriously, sublimely
unaware that viewers of a later age might find them just a mite pretentious, if
not downright silly. Among the guests
were ex-President Grant and his wife, who hopefully were not required to wear
costumes.

Despite the
advent of the Vanderbilts, Caroline Astor extended her sway for years. To show her distinction, she announced that
she would simply be known as “Mrs. Astor,” and had her calling cards printed
accordingly. In 1888 Ward McCallister
explained to a Tribune reporter that
there were only 400 people in New York society, a group small enough to fit
comfortably into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom; outside that group were people who
wouldn’t be at ease in a ballroom or would make others ill at ease. So appeared the term “the Four Hundred,”
which occasioned much comment and criticism.
And his Mystic Rose had thorns; for the socially ambitious, not to be
invited to the annual Astor Ball was calamitous. But in 1887 the Social Register appeared, a list of two thousand socially prominent
names with ample information about each: a challenge to Mrs. Astor’s Four
Hundred.

Not all the Astor
clan acquiesced in her assumption of the title “Mrs. Astor.” Her nephew Waldorf Astor particularly
resented it, thinking his wife just as deserving of the title, and moved to
England to insinuate himself into the British aristocracy. By way of revenge on his aunt, he tore down
his residence adjoining hers and in 1893 opened on the site the luxurious
thirteen-story Waldorf Hotel. Caroline
Astor was, to put it mildly, chagrinned, remarking sourly, “There’s a glorified
tavern next door.” Her son John Jacob
Astor IV now finally persuaded her to join the exodus northward, and in 1893,
having leapfrogged the Vanderbilts just as they had leapfrogged her, she
settled into a magnificent French chateau-style residence at Fifth Avenue and
65th Street, really a double residence housing her on one side and
her son and his family on the other. In
1897 the son then built the seventeen-story Astoria Hotel next to the Waldorf
Hotel, and later the two were joined to become the first Waldorf Astoria, whose
successor is now on Park Avenue.

Mrs. Astor's new residence at 65th Street. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

In her palatial
new residence the Mystic Rose, now a widow, continued to stage the Astor Ball,
exclusion from which banished one to the depths of social degradation. The art gallery featured a massive marble
fireplace at one end, and satin-paneled walls with a vast array of gilt-framed
paintings under a ceiling of elaborate molding with huge crystal chandeliers. This was the scene of the annual event, and
many other receptions as well, where the hostess greeted her guests under a
painting of her by the French artist Carolus-Duran, her very real fleshly
presence rivaling the likeness above her in formal dignity and chilling
authority. Yet this social dominatrix
now spent five months of the year in France, three in her palatial summer home
at Newport, and only four in New York.
Even in her absence, her authority was felt.

But it was not to
last. The Mystic Rose was fading, and McCallister
departed this earth in 1895, his funeral well attended by the socially
elite. By now many were questioning the
relevance of the Four Hundred, or even the Social
Register’s Two Thousand, including some who might reasonably aspire to
inclusion. Such feelings were
intensified by the publication of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives in 1890, a pioneering work of
photojournalism that documented the squalid living conditions of the city’s
poor, which he blamed on the greed and neglect of the wealthy. As the new social awareness grew, Mrs.
Astor’s balls came to an end, and her last years were ravaged by periodic
dementia. But she didn’t give up easily:
at times she was seen standing pathetically at the entrance to her empty
ballroom, greeting throngs of imagined guests.
She died in 1906, spared the news of her son’s death in the Titanic disaster of 1912, and her expatriate
nephew Waldorf’s becoming the 1st Viscount Astor in Britain in 1917.

Me and junk
mail: I hate it. It comes every day in huge batches, appeals
from worthy causes who got my name and address from the other worthy causes to
whom, in weak moments, I give modest but reliable donations. They try every conceivable ploy to get me to
open the envelope: fake or real handwritten addresses; URGENT; RUSH RUSH RUSH; 2
FOR 1 GIFT
OFFER; FREE GIFT INSIDE; PETITION ENCLOSED; no return address; CHECK
ENCLOSED. If there is no return
address, I discard the envelope unopened along with all the others. CHECK
ENCLOSED / DO NOT MUTILATE
OR TEAR ENVELOPE
is a new gimmick perpetrated recently by the National Cancer Research
Center. God knows I’m in favor of the
war against cancer, being a cancer survivor, but how much can you do? Still, I opened it and there, sure enough,
was a genuine check for the princely sum of $2.50. They invited me to accept the check, but
suggested that I donate that amount or a larger one to the fight against cancer
instead. Any decent, right-minded person
would have at once made a substantial donation. So what did I do? I cashed the check. Gleefully, without a smidgen of embarrassment
or shame. In the war against junk mail,
I give no quarter. And if they phone me,
you can imagine my response: “I don’t take solicitations by phone!” and then I
immediately hang up. In the war against
junk mail and junk phone calls – made even in the name of compassion, health,
and a better world – I am ruthless.
“Scrooge!” some may cry.
“Skinflint!” “A grinch who’d
steal Christmas!” Guilty, guilty, guilty
as charged. But it’s me or them, my
sanity and serenity versus their relentless attacks. And I intend to win.

Coming soon: Who really runs America? A look at conspiracy theories and the alleged
existence of a permanent unelected government, with emphasis on the prime
suspect, a multimillionaire and lord of think tanks who grew up with the
Unicorn Tapestries in his bedroom, and who knew everyone in the world who
counted.

Subscribe

What subscribers get: occasional notices of a book of mine being published, interesting reviews of my books, notice of my appearance at a book fair.
What they won't get: a steady stream of e-mails that wear their welcome out.